With a wide arc encompassing the institutional big men, who run technical institutes and colleges, and the micro-politics of friendships and relationships, this book is a deep dive into the world of Indian engineering colleges. It juxtaposes the stark realities and lived experiences of students against the global sensibilities and standards to which such institutes lay claim. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Tamil Nadu witnessed a record rise in the number of private engineering colleges. However, despite the manifold increase in the number of institutions and consequently, first-generation learners, hierarchies and inequalities continue to be reproduced in these almost temple-like institutions. Groups lacking the explicit markers of cultural and social capital struggle to find employment. By presenting perspectives on engineering students desires, anxieties, and processes of self-construction, the monograph examines how gender differences are reinforced through language, rules, regulations, surveillance, and control. In shifting the theoretical emphasis from subjects to subjectivities, Hebbar draws on the youths narratives of upward social mobility, crafting respectability, and notions of adulthood, holding a mirror to the fraught social scape of Indias private education sector.

This book explores the intersectional aspects of caste and gender in India that contribute to the multiple marginalities and oppressions of lower castes, with particular reference to Dalits, Muslims and women. It moves beyond the conventional accounts of experiences of women in unequal social and political relationships to examine how caste as a system and ideology shapes hegemonic masculinity and feminization of work, and thus contributes to the violence against women. The volume looks at their everyday lived realities within and across diverse social and political contexts — families, education systems, labour, communities, political parties, power, social organisations, the politics of representation and the writing of the subaltern women. With a range of empirical work, it brings forth the complexities of identity politics and further analyses its limits in regional and historical frameworks. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and specialists in caste and gender studies, exclusion and discrimination studies, sociology and social anthropology, history and political science. It will also be useful to Dalit writers and people working in the development sector in India.

This book attempts to make a holistic assessment and a humble intervention on the prevalent multiple social exclusion of dalits. The study is based in modern India, with a focus on Punjab in particular. It further substantiates that how caste and other exclusions are a lived reality. Challenging entrenched ideas, it uses multi-disciplinary perspectives/methodologies and lived experiences to comprehend dalits social exclusion, inter-sectionalities and social inequalities. It further interrogates linkages between key determinants, like, landlessness, educational attainment, asset ownership, gender discrimination, caste-based segregation and discrimination, employment, economic activity, development, state intervention policy, untouchability, political exclusion, diaspora effect, parallel sites of assertion, dalit consciousness, heterogeneities amongst dalits with social exclusion/inclusion. The salient feature of the book that it has covered all the regions of the state and 15 out of the total 39 scheduled castes. Drawing on Mixed Methods approach, multi-regional fieldwork and bottom-up perspective, this volume puts forward a perceptive analysis. It will be of great interest to researchers working in the fields of Social Exclusion, Sociology, Gender Studies, Dalit Studies, Caste Studies, Social Anthropology, Indian Politics, Economics, Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, Human Rights, Rural Development, Life Long Learning, Development Studies, Laws, and Police Administration.

Is the caste system disappearing? Are traditional hierarchies being replaced by competing equalities? Do globalization and liberalization automatically result in diminishing disparities? Are modern labour markets intrinsically meritocratic and efficient? Challenging the dominant discourse and demolishing various myths, this book provides answers to these and other critical questions on caste in its contemporary avatar. Linking the economics of caste with its politics, sociology, and history, this innovative book provides a stimulating assessment of continuities and changes in caste disparities over the last two decades. Deshpande uses rich empirical data to uncover how contemporary, formal, urban sector labour markets reflect a deep awareness of caste, religious, gender, and class cleavages. She convincingly argues that discrimination is neither a relic of the past nor is it confined to rural areas, but is very much a modern, formal sector phenomenon. This insightful book is an important step towards a multidisciplinary dialogue for understanding (and mitigating) inequalities based on birth and descent.

Comprises 12 papers which assess the contemporary situation of women in India in four broad domains: the cultural, the social, the political and the economic. Argues that despite apparently positive indicators of progress, particularly education and paid employment, little has changed.

Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.

The volume takes four key themes related to ageing – the experience of old age; intergenerational relations; economics of and social policy for ageing; longevity and the culture of ageing - and examines how these issues are emerging in different regions of Asia, specifically, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, China, Japan and South-East Asia. In placing these Asian cases studies in the broader context of debates about, and policies on, ageing more generally, it brings them into the mainstream of comparative research on ageing from which they have been too often excluded. As the studies show, the relationship between ageing and poverty is a complex one and often reflects policy towards the aged rather than that the aged themselves are unproductive and dependent. Ageing, moreover, can no longer be considered as simply a national question; we also need to consider the implications of its global dimension in terms of issues such as human rights and quality of life.